1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to media systems comprising devices and systems for storing, cataloguing, and playing media, such as music and video tracks. In particular, the present invention relates to such media systems which utilize flexible sets of metadata tags assigned to tracks based upon track genre.
2. Description of the Related Art
Existing media devices promise easy access to individual works in a digital media collection. Users can store digital copies of music and video recordings in such a device. Playback no longer requires that the user locate physical media and insert the media in a suitable player. Instead, users can access the digital copy stored in the media device and effect playback almost instantaneously.
All such media devices provide a catalog of recordings stored in the archive. The catalog contains Metadata that describes each recording stored in the media device. The challenge in delivering the convenience promised by such devices is in presenting the user with Metadata sufficient to select the desired recordings from the Collection. In the prior art, recordings are typically described by five fields of Metadata called “artist name”, “album name”, “song title”, “year”, and “genre”. Such a scheme is often sufficient for cataloguing popular music. For example, artist name=“The Beatles”, album name=“Help!”, song title=“Yesterday” accesses a familiar Beatles hit. However, serious music collectors often find these categories too limited to adequately catalog recordings in their collections. For example, the song “Yesterday” has been recorded by many other artists (more than 3000 versions, according to Wikipedia). How would a collector distinguish the original Beatles version from cover versions by Joan Baez, Frank Sinatra, or Ray Charles?He could assign each of these names to “artist name”, but then he has displaced the important information that the original artist was “The Beatles”. Five Metadata fields are not sufficient for serious collectors of popular music.
The problems created by the limited number of Metadata fields are even more severe for music from other genres, especially classical music. Consider a recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto with Itzhak Perlman violin soloist and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini. What gets assigned to the artist name tag? “Brahms”, “Itzhak Perlman”, “Carlo Maria Giulini”, and “Chicago Symphony Orchestra” are all names of artists, or a group of artists. And there are other problems. An album named “Great Recordings of the Century” tells a music collector nothing about the work, or works, on the recording. A recital album by a singer may have works by many composers, and how would one identify the accompanist? Five Metadata fields are not sufficient for serious collectors of music from any genre.
Yet simply providing more Metadata fields is not the answer either. A field useful in one class of recordings may not be useful in another class. For example, a field for specifying the name of the orchestra in a recording of the Brahms Violin Concerto has no value when specifying a Beatles recording. The screen space required to display Metadata is often precious, especially when the device with the display is hand-held. It makes no sense to waste it on Metadata with less than maximal utility.